


Overdrive

by The Curator of The Sands (GrimRevolution)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Blood, Gen, Non-Consensual, Non-consensual mind control, graphic depictions of injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-24 14:25:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14357340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrimRevolution/pseuds/The%20Curator%20of%20The%20Sands
Summary: The bond between paladin and lion goes both ways.If a paladin can pilot the lion...Who said the lion couldn't pilot the paladin?





	Overdrive

There was a click, the sound of air roaring where there was none, and then silence. Click. Whoosh. Beeping followed, soft and sure. It wasn’t disruptive but there, as if it had always been there. Existing like birds and bees and plants. Something shifted, quietly, off to the side. Mutters and murmurs created a strange drum beat that rose and fell, and through it all, there was the click. The whoosh. The silence.

“Pidge?” something touched a forehead she wasn’t aware existed until that moment.

And then she eyes and a nose and plastic that pressed into the skin around her mouth. She was sure that was important, but she was just a head at the moment and the brain had gone wandering off to explore something else.

“Pidge? Is that you?”

 _What a strange question to ask_.

oOo

The thing was, the mission started out relatively simple. No Galra, no invading aliens, not even a scuffle of hostility. Just evacuate the planet, help them to their already designated safe spot faster and cleaner than their ships would have done, and that was it.

Pidge wobbled a bit as the ground shook beneath her, but the earthquakes had grown steadily and slowly, monitored above by Coran who was constantly giving them updates about the core and the stability of the planet. Buildings had mostly toppled and what had been left were only the bare skeletons that had been stripped of belongings and life.

She wondered what it would be like to leave her planet behind, to know that Earth was dying and having to pack humans, animals, and everything else they could onto a couple of space ships. What it would be like leaving her planet to die. Honestly, Pidge hoped humanity was long gone before that happened. With how much they had ravaged the resources, polluted the atmosphere, and driven the native wildlife to extinction, it would make sense that Mother Earth would outlive them all. It was very simple, actually; Nature’s house rules are impartially enforced, indifferent to protestations, and were not designed with humans in mind.

Just like how this planet with its unstable core and its cracking crust did not care about the opinion of those who had lived there.

Pidge had to crawl over a tree that had fallen across an abandoned road. Its branches dug into the dead sign of a shop that had long been cleared out by its owners. There was nothing left inside of it, nor the next store. On and on it went; nothing but emptiness.

“ _Loading the last of the refugees onto the transport shuttles,_ ” Shiro’s voice was a clap of thunder in the quiet street. “ _Everyone, finish your last patrol and then report back to your lions_.”

There was a mix of voices responding with “copy that” and then humming silence settled in her helmet.

oOo

Hands touched her shoulders and arms like brushes of thought. Voices rose and fell, and then there was someone there again, a weighted heat beside her. “Can you open your eyes for me?”

 _Eyes?_ For a moment, she made sure had eyes, and then she focused on cracking them open. Bright light streamed in from her left and she shut them again, groaning.

“Sorry, sorry Pidge, one tick—” Something shifted and rustled, and there was warmth across her cheek and chip, cupping her jaw. “Try now?”

It wasn’t as much of an effort the second time, but the amount of focus she had to put into just lifting an eyelid was enough to make something worn and strain in the back of her mind ache. Everything was out of focus, as if she was staring at an insect through unpolished amber, and she blinked until lines on the ceiling came into focus and then the curtain of white hair and—

Allura leaned over her, eyes wide and bright and—even with a smile on her lips—filled with something Pidge couldn’t identify. It was the princess’ hand that was spreading warmth through her cheek and she leaned into it feeling dizzy and content.

Click. Whoosh. Silence.

“Do you know where you are?”

Did she? Pidge looked past Allura’s face at the pods. ‘Medical,’ she wanted to say, but opening her mouth seemed like too much so she looked back up at the princess and blinked her eyes. Slowly. Lethargic. Time felt like it was full of mud and slid past her body like a physical entity. Fingers moved through her hair, petting the bangs away from her face, nails scratching gently over her scalp.

She almost shut her eyes again but didn’t as Allura kneeled beside her.

“This is important,” the Altean’s gaze was pointed like a spearhead, “please—”

Someone said something closer to the middle of the room but, before Pidge could focus on them, Allura was speaking again.

“Blink once for yes and two for no, do you understand?”

Pidge blinked more out of surprise than actual comprehension, but the smile the princess gave her was warm.

“Are you Pidge?”

Click. Whoosh. Silence.

She stared at Allura, not quite understanding the question. Understanding why it was asked, not what it was asking. Her left side was numb and that ache returned in the far, fragile spider web cracks of her thoughts. Was she Pidge?

Or was she Katie?

Did it matter?

She blinked.

oOo

The building Pidge was standing beside rumbled as another earthquake ripped through the planet. Concrete and iron creaked and cracked and she was running running _running_ , using her jetpack to jettison herself over piles of debris. She didn’t look up to waste time calculating the distance between the building and the ground so she just _ran_.

A scream ripped through her throat as glass broke around her and the shadows became darkness.

oOo

After answering Allura’s questions, Pidge was lifted—an arm behind her back and another under her knees—and was brought to one of the healing pods. She saw yellow and blue and black and red before she was behind glass.

“Don’t worry,” the princess said, “we’ll see you soon.”

Pidge knew she wasn’t supposed to see the comforting smile drop to worry, to fear, but she saw it anyway.

That look on Allura’s face was the first thing Pidge thought of when her eyes opened. The glass and air around her hissed and she fell forward, just managing to catch herself before falling like a sack of potatoes. The numbness in her left side had faded to a dull but not unpleasant throb—like a limb waking up from being asleep as if it was a grumpy teenager. She stumbled in her first steps and almost face planted into Hunk’s arm before he caught her.

“Hey, _hey_ , I got you,” he said and wrapped her with a blanket as she shivered. “How you feeling?”

“Like I got hit by a truck,” Pidge grumbled and leaned into his much warmer body, “What happened?” He didn’t answer for a while and she blinked and tried to glare but just looked like a disgruntled cat after being woken up from a great sun nap. “What?” she said to his wide eyed look.

He scratched the back of his neck and didn’t meet her eyes. “Uh, well, we were kind of wondering if you could tell us that?”

She stumbled again, one knee giving out, and Hunk wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “I remember...” Pidge started and then paused because everything was blurry and distorted. “I—”

oOo

Something heavy and hard was pressing into the small of her back, crushing her ribs as she tried to breathe. A swarm of buzzing angry wasps had spread cross her shoulder and down her arm but she couldn’t look cause the glowing part of the armour on her forearm was facing an angle that shouldn’t have been natural. The clear material of her helmet was cracked and that crack was growing like a slow motion lightning strike.

She didn’t want to think what would have happened to her head had her helmet not been there.

_“P-i—!”_

The weight above her shifted and Pidge panted in the dark, her lungs hitching and ribs aching, sobs wrenching up desperately through her body. “Please,” she begged something that wasn’t there, “Please, _please_ —”

She couldn’t move.

She couldn’t move, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t see, and her arm hurt and she just wanted to go _home_.

Something deep in the back of her mind roared.

oOo

“You don’t remember?” Allura didn’t sound surprised, but she did sound disappointed.

Wrapped in a blanket burrito and sitting on the lounge couch, Pidge shook her head. Lance had padded her up with self heating pads and Hunk had slid some heated water pouches around her thighs. “No,” she admitted, “just the building falling and then... nothing.”

Keith was sitting on the top of the couch next to her and she leaned her head against his leg with a soft sigh. He rested his hand in her hair and she smiled to herself. A month ago he would have been standing in the corner, keeping his distance with his arms crossed. Now he was to her left with Hunk hovering on her right and Lance sitting on the floor in front of her feet, her knees on his shoulders, the back of her heels against his stomach.

Shiro was hovering behind Allura, his face soft, but she could see something else burning in his gaze.

“What happened?” Pidge asked them all as a whole.

Hunk patted her thigh.

“Just get better,” Shiro said.

The problem with ‘just get better’ is that it meant not doing much of anything. And when Pidge wasn’t doing anything, Pidge got bored. So she sat in the dark of her room and, tired of watching the ticks pass, she pulled her computer onto her mattress and played around with some of the half finished projects she had started but never quite finished.

After a few minutes she was digging through the castle’s security footage, flipping through saved files (like Lance sprinting out of his room to head to the bathroom or Hunk’s exploding space ingredients experiment) before going through the feeds of the past couple of days.

There was them getting the distress signal, the clamour for the lions, the teleduv activating. Pidge pressed the right arrow button on laptop, fast forwarding through the feed of Allura and Coran on the main deck until Allura was running towards the hallway leading further in to the castle.

Pidge followed her, switching the feeds with a couple taps on her keyboard but paused when the Princess reached the doors of the Green Lion’s hangar. She watched her lion land, watched Allura enter, but it was... it was different.

Because the Green Lion lowered her head, opened her mouth, and a Paladin stepped out.

But Pidge didn’t remember anything after the building crumbled around her. She had lain there, sobbing, but there was no rescue—not in her memory at least. But she watched the Green Paladin stumble down the walkway into Allura’s arms, nod against the blue and white dress, and stand still as the Princess pulled the helmet off sweaty, brown hair.

oOo

“PIDGE!”

“Pidge, hey, Pidge, can you hear us?”

“Converging on her last location, ETA sixty ticks—”

“The planet’s core is losing its gravitational structure; we don’t have much time—”

“Get those civilians out of here!”

“Pidge! Say something!”

oOo

Whoever it was had Pidge’s face, had her body had her hands and her hair and her stride. But they didn’t have her eyes—the brown was too cold, too dark and they were narrowed. Pidge watched as Not-Her walked through the hallway of the castle, blood dripping down a pale arm and leaving splatters across the ground.

At some point in time, the armour had been left behind for the simple black jumpsuit. It was ripped from the shoulder down, black fabric in ribbons. She could see the strange twisted position of her fingers and hand, the way it looked as if she had two elbows instead of one.

Pidge felt like throwing up.

Not-Her stumbled, broken hand slapping against the wall for balance, and those eyes focused on the palm mark left behind before following the red dripping down skin.

Tilting their head to the side, Not-Her blinked and squinted and sniffed—

A tongue dragged up the soft underside of the broken forearm, licking up the blood and smearing crimson across the white canvas like some grotesque sacrifice. Not-Her frowned at the taste, spat blood out on the floor, and continued down the hallway.

After a few steps, Not-Her lost their balance and collapsed.

Pidge shut her computer.

oOo

“No, no _please_ , I can’t, I can’t—”

Something rumbled, like the purr of a large cat.

“ _Help me_.”

oOo

It was four in the morning and Pidge stood, shivering, outside one of the many rooms in the castle. She stared at the blank, metal door for a moment, not quite sure how she mustered up the emotional or physical energy to get there. But she was there and, taking a deep breath, she knocked.

For a split second, while the sound was echoing down the hallway, she stared at her hand, flexed her fingers. Something inside her remembered _pain_ and she swallowed as the door hissed open.

“Pidge?” Allura looked regal in her long, cream pink nightgown, hair braided carefully into a bun, eyes bright in the dark. “You should be resting.”

“I—” Now that she thought about it, the whole idea seemed stupid. “I’m sorry, I just—” She shivered.

Allura moved aside. “Come on,” she said, keeping her voice soft, “we can sit on my bed and talk.”

Nodding once, Pidge stepped into the Princess’ room, tried not to think about how big and lonely it was, and climbed on the large, round mattress.

Sitting down beside her, Allura pulled the blankets so they covered both girls’ laps. “What’s wrong?” she spoke up once Pidge had settled into the pillows and had wrapped herself up.

It all seemed so damn silly, laying there on frilly pillows and blue blankets.

“I dunno,” Pidge murmured, avoiding the princess’ eyes. “I just... I watched video feed from the cameras and—”

Allura sighed a small, soft sigh and took Pidge’s hand in her own. “Shiro was hoping that it would take you a bit longer to see that,” she said, “none of us had hopes of ever keeping it from you, but we didn’t want you to... worry while you were recovering.”

“What happened?” Pidge hated how small her voice was, how small she _felt_.

“We’re not sure,” Allura admitted, “there are some... guesses but the only thing we could think of was that, somehow, the Green Lion—for a lack of better term—piloted _you._ ”

oOo

Concrete and steel groaned, shifting slightly before it rose, higher and higher, just enough for an arm to push out underneath the debris. Fingers clawed against the ground before latching on to a crack and _pulled._ Metal screeched against metal, something ripped, but a bloodied figure with a cracked helmet slowly emerged from beneath the ruins of the building.

Yellow eyes glowed, sharp and bright even underneath the light of the star before fading to brown.

Above, the Red Lion roared as it came in for a landing.

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was written as a donation to [number 5: a pidge zine](https://pidgevoltronzine.tumblr.com//). You can read the zine for free on google drive
> 
> i currently am working on other zine projects (including otplease, a star guardian zine, and a few others) and have been dragged back in to kryptonian hell. that's been fun. always love me some superfam though i don't know if i'm gonna watch that new 'krypton' show. decisions decisions.
> 
> more zine fics will be on the way soon including my hunkxpidge fic from the pidge shipping zine--though i'm not quite sure when i can post that (i should check, just to be sure).


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